


Another Chance

by TheMoments (TBs_LMC)



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beer, Bittersweet, Canonical Character Death, Default Shepard (Mass Effect), First Kiss, Friendship/Love, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Love, M/M, Mass Effect 3, Past Kaidan Alenko/Shepard, Post-Canon, Sad, Shepard (Mass Effect) Dead, Synthesis Ending (Mass Effect), Vancouver
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29283411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TBs_LMC/pseuds/TheMoments
Summary: Two years after the final battle that made John Shepard a legend, Kaidan Alenko reflects on who his lover was, why he’d made the choice he had and the new possibilities that now exist for him thanks to the gift Shepard gave to an entire galaxy.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Male Shepard, Kaidan Alenko/Steve Cortez
Kudos: 11





	Another Chance

**Author's Note:**

> I had purposely only played ME3 all the way through its ending once because I couldn't handle it (yep, I get that emotionally involved). I had never played as John Shepard through ME1, 2 & 3 until now and thanks to a mod, romanced Kaidan all the way through. Aaaaaaand became a complete, blubbering fool this time around for the ending I chose. So...my catharsis was to write this, to put some hope back for Kaidan (to whom I couldn't stop apologizing IRL) and another character I have always adored to little bits.

**ANOTHER CHANCE**

* * *

I know what he did. Why he did it.

We all do. At least, those of us who knew him best.

Leave it to our commander. Our leader. The one and only man who for years has been all that stood between every life in the Milky Way and death.

Leave it to John Shepard to not only save both organic and synthetic life, but to break so many hearts in the process.

Mine included, at the time.

I stand here alone on the deck of my home. I watch the sunset, beer in hand. My father is still MIA, presumed dead. My mother didn’t make it. And neither did the man I loved. The man I wasted so much time missing and then doubting before finally committing. Years too late, as it turns out.

There was never going to be a world, I don’t think, where he and I would have some kind of fairy tale happily ever after. But there’s a hollow ache inside me that I know will be there until the day I die. A piece of me that will never be quelled. Until the day I see him at that bar in Heaven, as Garrus told me Shepard promised him. We’ll all meet there. Hell, there’ll probably be a Normandy just waiting for us. Maybe God needs us to kick some hellion ass. He couldn’t find a better man to lead his armies than John, archangels be damned.

James is an N7 now. He keeps me updated on his exploits. Has had Shepard’s name tattoo’d right under N7 on his back. Will never forget that Shepard equaled his pull-up record in the Citadel apartment that’s long-since been sold.

Garrus is gone. Nobody’s heard from him since the Normandy returned to Earth. Personally, I think he’s looking for his family on Palaven since he lost contact with them and has never heard anything after their last communique. But maybe Shepard’s death was a little too hard on him. I know they were as close as any two men could be. I miss that turian to this day and always just hope he’s okay, and happy.

Liara is still the Shadow Broker, but she operates differently now. She’s part of the communication hub that binds us all together in our new synthorganic existence. That’s what we’re called now, all of us. Though I don’t hear from her often, I understand that she and her drell friend Feron are in a very steady relationship and are even contemplating children.

I suppose it will be interesting to see what comes of the organic life currently mucking around in the various primordial soups that will see them evolve. We have yet to really come to a consensus as to where they will fit into this new world order, but most think they’re already synthorgs. That there will literally never be purely organic life in the Milky Way ever again.

That means those of the Andromeda Initiative, if they survive, will be the only organic species from the Milky Way that’s left. A heavy burden they will never realize they bear. Kind of hard to wrap your mind around them not being awake for another six hundred or so years. And possibly never knowing what happened back here.

I keep to myself these days if you don’t count my students. There’s no need for Spectres anymore. Barely any need for the Alliance, let alone renegades like Shepard’s crew once were. How different life is now. How peaceful. Better, and yet some part of me mourns the loss of what we used to be.

I told John once that how a thing goes down, matters. And he managed to make the biggest thing in the galaxy go down by sacrificing himself.

That matters.

It matters a _lot_. Especially to those of us who loved him. Who barely get through a day without sinking into an emotional hole it’s really hard to dig yourself out of.

In spite of Kasumi's and James’ successes, I still get daily notes from them, even just one-liners, telling me how hard it was to get past a moment or a memory. Aria from Omega even emails me now and again. She’ll gloat about her space station and then share a memory of Shepard from the mission I knew nothing about, that secured her loyalty for the final battle. Thane’s son keeps in touch, and so does Samara. Jack, well, we were never close so I’m lucky if she remembers to email me every six months or so.

Traynor is a communications specialist on Earth. Hackett’s retired. Joker and EDI are still flying the Normandy, only now she’s a scout ship that goes from planet to planet ferrying whatever payloads they require and making sure everyone has what they need for all the rebuilding that’s still going on.

Dr. Ann Bryson and James are a thing now. It makes me laugh how tongue-tied he gets around her, but he fell for her hard when she got mind-controlled and they’re not only married, but she’s expecting their first kid any day. He’s head-over-heels for her and it’s heartwarming to watch them together the few times we’ve been able to connect.

Jacob and Miranda I never really knew except through tales told by Shepard, but they both reached out to me after and asked if I’d convey their condolences. Chakwas is still on the Normandy because she’ll go down with that ship come hell or high water. Zaeed’s retired to the Caribbean, Tali’s working with the geth to help rebuild her homeworld and I’m half-wondering if Garrus isn’t hiding out there on Rannoch helping them incognito, because she’s entirely too chipper to be missing the man Shepard caught her making out with on the Normandy right before the big battle.

The one person I see the most of, who’s over here so much I’m on the verge of just telling him to move in to ease up on the travel time from Seattle, is Steve Cortez. I guess I never really knew how close of friends John had become with him. Eventually Steve opened up and explained to me about Robert. About how Shepard came upon him crying one day in Normandy’s shuttle bay as he listened to a recording of his and Robert’s final conversation for the umpteenth time.

“If not for him, I’d have probably just sank into a depression so deep I wouldn’t have been around for that final battle,” he told me several weeks after Shepard’s sacrifice. We shared a beer and he really opened up to me emotionally in a way that even John never did. It…helped. A lot. To hear about a softer side of the man I had loved for more years than I could even remember, a side that helped a grieving husband cope, lay his past to rest and start to rebuild himself…it did something to me. It was as if John had been laying the groundwork telling _me_ what to do when I inevitably lost him to the destiny he was born to fulfill.

Who was I to get between him and Fate, after all?

Steve’s been there for me, and I for him, these past two years. I suppose the sting of missing Shepard is familiar just because I had already lost him once to death and grieved him back then because I didn’t know Cerberus was slowly bringing him back to life. I’ve been around this block before, crying over the man I love, missing him, making my way painfully through the process, learning how to cope, how to move on. It’s as if the first time he died prepared me for the second, and while my eyes have not been entirely dry, I have understood that this was why he was sent to us when he was sent to us.

Commander John Shepard was born when and where he was born, and lived the life he lived, in the most remarkable way possible. His humility belied his heavens-granted purpose, which was to end a cycle of mass extinction that had been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, if not multi-millions of them. That this one human being could be the catalyst for such a feat defies all logic and reason. And yet here we all are with the green eyes and synthorganic bodies to prove it.

That I was privileged to have his love and hold his body for as long as I did, was a gift. A treasure I hold close to my soul. I even shared bits and pieces with Steve one winter night in Vancouver as we sat together in front of a roaring fireplace sharing beers, steaks and heartaches. Not all our intimacies, of course, but different things about the man who always seemed so stoic, almost aromantic. But his eyes and that soft voice of his, they spoke the volumes that the man who’d been a soldier almost more years than he’d been alive, couldn’t always articulate.

The fact that his last words to me were to say he loved me, laying that bare in front of James and others who were nearby, was the most demonstrative he had _ever_ been outside our alone time. Or, as it turned out, _would_ ever be.

I turn as I hear the front door open. I smile. There’s only one person who has a key to this place besides me. He approaches. I feel him before I see him, as anyone would now that we have these biotic fields that interact. It’s a new experience, having yours touch someone else’s for the first time. It’s either incredibly annoying or incredibly beautiful. With Steve, it’s always been the latter from the first time it happened aboard Normandy, after it all went down.

Steve moves closer and his field touches mine. “Hi,” he says in that extraordinarily soft voice I’ve come to rely on being there nearly every night for dinner and companionship before he heads home.

“Hi,” I smile, turning to look at him. “How was your shuttling today?”

Steve’s been flying shuttles for dignitaries since recovering from his crash in London. He’s become quite the celebrity, having once been the man who ferried Shepard everywhere to every planet and space station and battle he ever faced during that last go-round.

He once told me that in his last conversation with John, he called him “my pilot,” and because of that, Steve can’t _make_ himself stop flying shuttles. He feels like every time he gets into one, he’s back in those days of fear and hope when his ace flying was all that stood between Shepard’s safety aboard Normandy and his safety on the ground. It was his job to ferry the hero to and fro, and he felt like that job wasn’t over yet somehow.

I understood. Though I’d not gone back into any kind of Alliance service, I spent my days teaching people who’d never before had biotic capabilities – people like Steve – how to use them safely and effectively. That work had moved from adults with newfound abilities in the aftermath of the Crucible, to the children they were now having.

I had often wondered what it might’ve been like to have a genetic child with John. Such things had been possible before only with a surrogate mother’s willingness and a lot of gene splicing. But these days advances had been made to the point where women didn’t even _need_ to have babies anymore because synthetic wombs did the job just as well, and it was a lot safer than the process of human childbirth.

How things might have been different if John had survived. But then if he had, we wouldn’t all be who and what we are now. Because one of the things scientists discovered in the first year after the galaxy was saved, was that every single living being now carried one particular DNA sequence that should not have been there. Eventually, thanks to samples Dr. Chakwas had on-hand as John’s doctor, the scientists realized we were now _all_ carrying his DNA.

All of us. Every human, krogan, turian, asari, quarian, geth, hell, even EDI – we all carried a piece of him inside of us. Which meant so did any children that any of us bore. John Shepard will be alive forever and ever, as long as even one Milky Way species exists, because of the sacrifice he made so that we could live. Nobody knew how it’d happened, really, but there it was. DNA didn’t lie, after all.

I turn to look at Steve, who smiles somewhat shyly at me as he unscrews the cap from the beer he nabbed from the fridge on the way in and then takes a swig from the bottle. I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking today, and I feel like maybe it’s time to find out if there’s a place for a new relationship in my life. One that’s sort of already been there, much like John and I had experienced since we served our first mission together when he saved me from the Prothean beacon on Eden Prime.

“I was thinking of grilling some steaks,” I say.

“Sounds good. Want me to fire up the pit?” he asks.

“In a bit,” I acknowledge. “I…kind of wanted to run something else by you first.”

“Sure,” he says amiably, and I can tell he’s curious. He really is handsome. Cute, even at our ages. And he has a heart bigger than anyone’s. But it’s his eyes that do me in, every time I look at them. I’m not a stupid man. I know what that means.

If there was one thing I’d learned from my time circling John Shepard like the too-brightly burning star that he was, it was what I was about to share with Steve.

“I told John, last time we had a conversation that didn’t involve last good-byes with Reapers trying to kill us, that I didn’t have many regrets, but that I had some.” I half-smile, picking at the label on my beer bottle. “Really, there were only two. One was not being able to ensure the safety of my parents in that shitstorm we endured.”

“I hear that,” Steve acknowledges with a nod and swig from his bottle.

“The other was all the time I lost with him. First, through nobody’s fault, when he was MIA for those two years before he came back to life. But the rest was on me.” I shook my head. “I doubted him. Loved him so badly it hurt but couldn’t move past my own stubbornness until I almost didn’t have him at all.”

Steve’s face grew sad. His eyes moved to the window where stars were beginning to appear in the early night sky.

“Our time together was so short, all things considered, that honestly, I barely _did_ have him at all.” I shrug. Look away. Feel another pang of regret. Take a few steps forward until I’m standing right in front of Steve. “But that taught me something, just like I’ll bet your time with Robert taught you.”

His eyes meet mine and in them I see…yes. I see what I’m looking for. It’s there, shining back at me, impossibly so, and I can’t help but duck my head. Oh, how I used to be so shy around Shepard like this, in the early days when I couldn’t fathom someone like him wanting someone like me.

Funny how that feeling doesn’t go away no matter how old you get.

“The thing I learned,” Steve shares, “that Shepard helped reinforce for me, was not to take one moment for granted.” His eyes don’t leave mine when our gazes reconnect. “Not one moment, Kaidan.”

I nod. “That’s a good lesson,” I agree.

Steve takes my beer and sets our bottles down on the nearby coffee table. Then he takes my hands. I feel my fingers curl around his. Our eyes look at the connection, then back up as Steve asks, “It feels right, somehow, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I nod, remembering how Shepard had echoed that thought when we sat at Apollo’s on the Citadel for my so-called sanity check. I guess I knew, then, didn’t I? I know what it means for something like this to feel right. Because as right as it had been with John, that’s how right it feels now with Steve.

We have a shared love of one man already. This is barely a leap in logic to connect the dots. I think both of us had been prepared by Shepard for this very moment, whether he knew or not, and whether we knew it or not.

I suspect he knew all along that he wasn’t coming back, though. That was why he had had that final nightmare he told me about before the last battle. The one in which he embraced the boy he’d been unable to save on Earth, and then they both burned. He knew that was our last night together. That our kiss in London was our last kiss. That telling me he loved me as the Normandy risked its very existence to evacuate me and James, were the last words he would ever say to me. He knew that was his purpose. His legacy.

Tears shine in Steve’s eyes and I’m pretty sure mine look the same.

“Not one moment for granted,” Steve murmurs and then he leans forward and presses his lips to mine. And in that moment, I _feel_ Shepard smile.

And I know that this is okay.

“Steve,” I breathe, wrapping my arms around him as he embraces me.

This is right.

He pulls away and leans his forehead against mine. “Kaidan,” he whispers, eyelids fluttering closed. “Kaidan,” he breathes. He smiles.

This is what’s meant to be.

Our lips meet again and they’re smiling when they do. The kiss deepens and I feel the beauty and certainty of this moment, this place where Steve Cortez and Kaidan Alenko, against all odds, continue the legacy of love that made it possible at all.

Thank you, John.

For giving us all another chance.


End file.
